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BOOK REVIEW: WHEN GOD DOESN’T MAKE SENSE: Holding on to your faith during the hardest times: DR. JAMES DOBSON: 1993: 250 PAGES

Establish your foundation not on ephemeral emotions but on the authority of the written word. Our feelings about His inaccessibility mean nothing! His word is more reliable than our spooky emotions.

Don’t lean on your own ability to understand, and most importantly don’t lose faith. I believe this is the most aggravating part of the whole saga, cos as humans we rationalize everything, and when we don’t understand things, we are thrown into disarray. We should not try to understand everything, we should aim to trust completely.

and those who are stuck in a job they hate, and those who would not touch business even with a pole, and those who are just starting out, and those who have been at it for a little while – the list is endless. This book is for you all – REWORK.

It is no ordinary desire that survives disappointment, discouragement, temporary defeat, criticism and the constant accusation of being a ‘waste of time’. It is a burning desire, an obsession!

It’s funny how things seem tougher when you take a decision about something or decide to make a change. You decide to lose weight by eating healthier meals then you get offers for free meals of small chops, pizzas and ice cream not once or twice and you remember you don’t even have to pay! You decide to help a friend and you find out that helping out can also be really inconvenient. It’s funny how there’s always a hurdle to cross when you make a decision or take a stand.

This book will teach you how to close the gap between ideas and achievements, good intentions and their successful completion. It will guide you on how to keep your enthusiasm while crossing those hurdles that seem positioned just for you.

Yes and No. He is for real and he truly does drive himself since he loves driving. So back to the question of his horn usage, 10 times in a year is almost impossible! For those outside Lagos, let me quickly give a brief description of driving in Lagos. Lagos is the 17th busiest city and 3rd worst city to drive in the world with over a million vehicles driving daily on the roads, (African Association of Public Transport, 2010, LAMATA, 2014), notice I said vehicles not just cars. We have tricycles, bikes, transport buses, pick-up vans and articulated vehicles all vying for space on Lagos roads. Not forgetting the bad roads in some areas; if you are not in Lagos, you can only but imagine the congestion.

Everyone is in a hurry, everyone feels super road-smart, everyone feels they own the road and have all the road rights. The roads are never quiet with horns blazing from defensive driving, offensive overtaking, pedestrians crossing the road right under a pedestrian bridge or using the horn as defense from mean truck drivers (this was me as a learner). So how does one drive around and keep the horn usage to less than 10 in a year not in a day??? (Now that’s a serious question).

Luckily for you, I know where you can find this intriguing person and learn more about his personality which by the way has made him a success.

The truest test of a driver is to be able to drive without waking up sleeping passengers – no horns, no sudden braking, no road rage, no thumping into potholes.

All too often negotiators end up like the proverbial children who quarreled over an orange. After they finally agreed to divide the orange in half, the first child took one half, ate the fruit and threw away the peel, while the other threw away the fruit and used the peel from the second half in baking a cake.

‘Small Giants’ goes against everything I have ever heard about business growth, and It provides answers to numerous unanswered questions about how the future of a business can be decided. It reminds owners of the power they have concerning the future of their businesses – the power to CHOOSE– Tosan A.

#BOOK REVIEW: SMALL GIANTS|BO BURLINGHAM|PORTFOLIO|2005|232 PAGES

Small Giants is about a study of companies who deliberately choose to remain ‘small’ (this is relative with respect to their fields and their ability to expand). Bo Burlingham identified a class of companies which did not fit into the popular classes of small, big or very big and decided to do more research of them especially since it was a deliberate and sometimes more active effort on the part of these companies to stay small. He selected 14 companies for his research and organised a field study on these companies, highlighting areas where they are similar and also their differences. Small Giants is the result of this study.

This book felt so real, it literally feels like we are actually on the field with the author listening live to the insightful answers to tough being asked to business owners and their teams – people, you may never meet anytime soon, hearing them tell their stories of how they faced the pressure of deciding when to grow and how fast to grow. I liked the author’s writing style as it was a combination of interesting stories gotten from interviews and the results of a field study of like-minded individuals and businesses. It was an interesting and a thoroughly educative one all in all.

LEARNING POINTS

WHAT MAKES A BUSINESS A SMALL GIANT?

Mojo: The first thing to note about Small Giants is the soul of the business – the mojo. The thing that endears it to its community – customers, suppliers, employees and other stakeholders. The uniqueness about a company that is sometimes inexplicable but is obviously noticeable.

The freedom to choose: I wouldn’t say this is entirely freedom but more like the responsibility to decide which way to go rather than been automatically led towards growth; deciding whose definition of success are we go by. It involves being intentional about business growth instead of being shaped by outside forces. This is focal point about Small Giants. It is about leaders exercising their rights to chart the future of their company and deliberately choosing not to grow big but to work at being excellent at what they do and enriching the lives of those in and around them – their physical and psychological environment.

Companies choosing to remain small rather than dilute ownership; companies who choose to maintain independence and control on the type of business that they become without much external input; businesses that choose to be champions in one geographical area rather than nobody in the world scheme of things; Businesses that care about quality, excellence, and heightened customer satisfaction; Companies that care about their roots and community – Small Giants

The culture of intimacy: Small Giants have very close ties with their communities which is very different from the usual corporate responsibility but one that is mutual in that both parties benefit from each other whilst also helping each other. There is also a high level of understanding and mutual affection among employees in the workplace where they are endeared to the business and not coerced to function. These companies have values that permeate through almost every sphere of their business which are very clear to all stakeholders.

WHAT COMPELS BUSINESSES TO GROW?

Some pressures that business owners have to overcome or yield to as the business unfolds:

Socio-economic/ psychological: Everyone just assumes businesses are birth to become multinationals and make comments and/or push business owners towards that direction.

Owner’s personal ambition: This could easily be a fallout of the above point; when the society has expectations of you, it easily guides your personal goals for growing your business

Suppliers: As suppliers grow, they expect you to grow with them and align you with their growth plans.

Competitors: Being small sometimes mean that you lose your voice in the midst of bigger competitor because you are not big enough to be heard. You could also be downtrodden if you are too small to withstand the impact of the elephants in your field.

Opportunities: Opportunities that come in earlier than planned.

Employees: After having being round most units and stayed in the business for long, your best employees cannot see a growth path for their careers; when you stay small.

Customers: when your clients expect you to provide your unique solution to wherever they may find themselves in future (geographic) or to expand your products to meet their basket of needs (product expansion).

THE FUTURE OF SMALL GIANTS: Whilst Small Giants face the issue of effective succession since most of all the distinctness, excellence and mojo could be lost during the transition if bought or passed down to future generations; they are everywhere making impact on their community at large. They are around us, among us and growing with us if we only just looked a little closer.

Tosan’s take:I thoroughly enjoyed this book! You know when you just see a book that talks about all you have been trying to express but you seem to be alone on it. This is what Small Giants means to me. I have always asked my team the question – Should we strive to be Big or should be strive to be profitable? Although in our volume driven sector, this answer is not that straightforward, but this just goes a long way to validate my concerns in managing my business. Every business owner concerned about excellence or wants to maintain the original reason why they started the business should definitely read this book. For growing business owners out there, remember bigger isn’t always better.

Being clear about why you were created and where you are headed would really help you stay focused in a world where there are lots of opportunities and options available to either pull or push you. Your purpose serves as your road map through life – Tosan A.

We are always looking for complex answers to our desire to change or achieve better results, maybe because we feel our needs are either complex or we just want to have access to the excuse that it was too complex that was why we could not achieve the desired changes. The latter may be why when we see simple answers, we are upset that the answers undermine our problems. Jack‘s recommended success principles are so simple that we could choose to either ignore them or just get into it right away –Tosan A.